Texts
of this nature abound in both mass media and academic discussion of Buffy,
resulting in a wide variety of problematic "redemptions" for the show—from Sherryl Vint's dismissal of Sarah Michelle Gellar's status as a sexualized celebrity figure
whose real-world status as a glamour icon and makeup shill undercuts Buffy's
liberatory potential as merely a "way to make feminism fun" (par. 22) to Zoe-Jane
Playdon's even more problematic figuration of those who don't wholeheartedly
embrace Buffy as feminist as misguided tools of the patriarchy who simply
misunderstand the show and mistakenly apply to it a set of standards
attributed to Germaine Greer and Janice Raymond—standards, incidentally,
which would figure Buffy as compromised by her construction within media, as
well as within a patriarchal control circuit in both the Council and
entertainment industries (157). In
other words, if you don't see Buffy as redemptively feminist, it's because you
simply don't understand fully the pagan festivals of Eostre, attendant goddess
mythology, or Buffy's "unacknowledged labor of reproduction" (despite her not
being a literal mother, nor serving in any official capacity related to the
reproduction of anything but Maybelline sales) and a host of other
extra-textual confabulations seemingly unrelated to the show itself (see
Playdon, 182-194). These
excuses for the show's limitations seem rooted more in a desire to find points
of identification and redemption within the text than a concerted effort to
read the text within its presentational and cultural contexts. Even
the most responsible and widely cited critics tend to allow the text to stand
without significant intervention into its more problematic moments and
portrayals, as when Rhonda Wilcox cites Vint and Patricia Pender's works as a
road to claiming that the show evidences "instances of normalizing the
physical presentation of the character" (179), which does not exactly redeem
the more frequent glamour processing, or when Roz Kaveney blithely dismisses
critiques of the seeming punishment of lesbianism that comes in Tara's death
(35) as "nonsense."
[4] On the other hand, there are those who simply dismiss the text's
disruptive, transgressive or feminist potential, perhaps most notoriously
authors Michael P. Levine and Steven Jay Schneider's crypto-Freudian reading
of the show which posits that the character Buffy herself cannot hope to
contain meaning as her "girl next door" status marks her as a potential love
object, but whose attractiveness according to cultural beauty status makes her
an empty lust signifier, one who can "embod[y] certain central themes of love
and desire" (302) but cannot express agency. For Levine and
Schneider, "[I]t is BtVS scholarship that warrants study at this point,
not BtVS itself" (301), as to them, the show succeeds only to
the extent that it recycles conventional and archaic stereotypes of gender and
the sexual containment of young women (300-302), a point they make by applying
the all-too appropriately warmed-over 1912 Freud essay "On the Universal
Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," in which Freud, in all his "what
do women want?" misogyny, posits that men inherently debase the objects
of their lust and can rarely come to love them.
In the logic of "Feeling for Buffy," it follows that Buffy, and by
extension the show, cannot hope to access the complexity of human life and
struggle, because she—and perhaps even the show's other glamorized female
actors, or even those audience members who both consume and imitate its
attendant imagery —are simply too attractive to be taken seriously as
people, a reduction which seems to reveal more about the authors' biases than
about the stakes of the show.
[5] Rather than simply embrace or negate a feminist reading of the show
(or negate but redeem it because of our love for it), then, we posit that the
show does attempt to engage with a liberal, emancipatory, discursive feminism,
one most aligned philosophically with the second-wave but presented in
post-feminist fashion, but that a reading of this effort reveals gaps,
inconsistencies, and contradictions within both the show's version of feminist
empowerment, and within the larger world's feminisms also.
In effect, then, while the feminism of BtVS is compromised and
often ambivalent, these problems do not simply erase its effort to engage with
feminism any more than its efforts redeem the show as simply and only "feminist."
Reading the positioning of adult women, as well as the treatment of
both women's real and textual bodies affords us an opportunity to examine the
ways in which the show—like popular feminism more generally—often builds
its version of empowerment upon the reinstatement of a generational divide and
a "disidentification" with older women which both "redeem[s] whatever text it
is for the modern girl's consumption" and "remake[s] the cultural memory of
the censorious feminist" (Brunsdon, 45), treating the concerns and feminisms
of adult women as out-of-touch at best and actively antagonistic to the aims
and interests of the young at worst. In
this way, then, BtVS's treatment of adult women, and of women's bodies,
speaks to a problematic tendency to treat the concerns of women as periodized
and generational, and to discourage thereby cross-generational cooperation and
coalition-building. Nowhere is
this more apparent than in the treatment of secondary characters.
[6] How does Buffy, and how do the other young, female characters more
generally, learn to become women in the Buffyverse?
As J. P. Wlliams has noted, "Even as it proclaims allegiance to ideals
of female power, Buffy presents few positive female models for its
teenage protagonists" (61; see also Jowett, 174). In this section, we give an idea of the range of mature,
adult roles available to women on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
We have limited ourselves in this section mostly to characters on Buffy
because of that show's alleged feminist "mission statement," partially
summarized by Joss Whedon in the pilot episode: "It's such a charge when
somebody underestimates you and you turn out to be stronger than they are and
that's really the heart of the show" (DVD commentary, "Welcome to the
Hellmouth," B1001) Without
providing an exhaustive list, we can still say that the majority of adult
female characters on Buffy are portrayed as nonessential, largely
ignorant of and incapable of handling the supernatural complexities of life on
the Hellmouth and thus unable to participate meaningfully—or long-term—in
the show's central premise and its main vehicle for female empowerment, the
fight against evil. Additionally,
while there is obvious overlap among characters and themes in Buffy and
its spin-off, Angel itself is based on a different aesthetic, that of
noir. As Jennifer Stoy suggests: "From its inception, Angel has been a
noir series, borrowing everything from the visual aestheticÉto the stock
characters (detective Angel, limey Wesley Windham-Pryce, girl Friday Cordelia
Chase, femme fatale Lilah MorganÉ) to familiar storylines" (163).
As Joss Whedon himself says in the commentary to the pilot episode of Angel,
he felt like he was "betraying [his] feminist sensibilities" (DVD commentary, Angel,
"City of," A1001) by beginning with Angel rescuing a stock "damsel in
distress." While Whedon has
attempted to "update" the noir genre, Stoy provides the critique: "Joss Whedon
might know how to portray a femme fatale, [but] his sympathy towards her
position and moral reasoning is as inflexible as his post-war forebears—a
troublesome position for a Ôfeminist' television series maker" (164).
For these reasons, we will focus on female characters on Angel
only insofar as they have a developed backstory coming from previous
appearances on Buffy, which has allowed characters like "girl Friday"
Cordelia Chase to transcend in some ways the limited and decidedly
non-feminist stereotypes of the noir genre.
[7] These limitations on female activity and occupation are visible in
recurring adult female characters as well as in one-episode characters.
Take for instance the teachers and professionals who work at Sunnydale
High School. Several of the teachers are portrayed as incompetent, such as
history teacher Mrs. Jackson in "The Puppet Show" (B1009) who confiscates the
talking puppet/demon hunter to restore classroom order only to have Xander
steal it from her classroom cupboard, or Miss Beakman who accepts fake
homework after Amy performs a spell on her in "Bewitched, Bothered, and
Bewildered" (B2016). The
functionaries at Sunnydale High can even become the subject of the gang's
investigation, as Miss French the sexual "predator" biology teacher She-Mantis
attempts to mate with Xander and then kill him in Season One's "Teacher's Pet"
(B1004) or as the lunch lady—who does not even merit a name—in Season
Three's "Earshot" (B3018) is the one determined to kill all the students for
being "vermin" who "eat filth." This
is similarly the case for Nurse Greenleigh in "Go Fish" (B2020): she is aware
of Coach Marin's experiments on the swimteam, and yet she is incapable of
convincing him to stop. He calls
her a "quitter" and pushes her into the sewer to be eaten by the monster
remnants of the swim team. Interestingly
enough, Nurse Greenleigh, as an overweight, middle-aged woman, is only seen as
fit to be food for the swim team. Later
in the episode, as Nurse Greenleigh's facedown, forgotten body floats by, the
coach pushes Buffy into the sewer saying that although they have been fed, "boys
have other needs." In the
culmination of the episode, when Buffy accidentally drops Coach Marin into the
sewer, she says that the swim team "really love their coach," suggesting that
the monsters are discerning enough to avoid sexual contact with an actual
adult woman, especially when other options are available.
[8] By far the most complex teacher at Sunnydale High is Jenny
Calendar. From the start of her
run on the show she engages Giles in lively debate, challenges his worldview
and even his knowledge, telling him, "You have got to read something that was
published after 1066" ("School Hard," B2003), and pursues him as a sexual
partner. She is easily brought
into the group because of her abilities—she is the "techno-pagan" who forms
the circle of Kayless on the internet to get the demon Moloch out ("I Robot,
You Jane," B1008), she possesses her own library of texts (including the one
that reverses the invitation for Angelus to enter Buffy's home), and she
combines her knowledge of magic and computers to translate the ritual to
restore Angel's soul ("Passion," B2017).
Furthermore, she has embraced her sexuality, attending the Burning Man
festival, dangling a corkscrew from some unnamed body part not her ear, and
suggestively telling Giles she wants to "make [him] squirm" ("The Dark Age,"
B2008). Her independence and
freedom are unmade, however, by episode thirteen of Season Two, "Surprise,"
when a meeting with her uncle reveals that she is "Janna, of the Kalderash
people," and her subordination to the patriarchal order and her duty to her "people"
become clear (Jowett, 175). J. P.
Williams has pointed out that Jenny is "the adult woman best equipped to
survive Buffy's world" but she "cannot triumph" (71).
In fact, much as her name emphasizes the quickly passing days that
structure human mortality, her circumstances continually reframe her within a
circuit of males angling for possession and control of her body.
While Giles's desire for sexual union with her seems most benign of all
such forces, it bears notice that overt initiation of their romantic
entanglement results in her being literally possessed by a demon associated
with Giles and his wayward youth. This
chain of attempted containments and possessions—by Giles, by the demon which
uses her body as a host, by her uncle and culture of origin and, finally,
Angelus—culminates in her demise. Her
death is the "ultimate woman-in-jeopardy scene," and the way Angel lays out
her body for Giles to see afterward emphasizes her passivity: "her arms laid
out with palms upward, her torso twisted to achieve maximum visibility"
(Williams 71). Holly Chandler
explains that Calendar's dead body is more of a message between men: Angel has
effectively communicated to Giles that "he got to her first" (par. 48). Jenny Calendar's eyes are wide and staring, as Joyce's will
be in the episode "The Body" (B5016), and as Anya's will be near the end of "Chosen"
(B7022). In each case, the
staring eyes indicate the finality of death, and it is no coincidence that
this is projected onto the adult women of the show. As Whedon himself disclosed in an interview associated with "Passion"
(B2017), the same episode in which Jenny Calendar died, "death is final and
death is scary" (DVD interview, Season Two); according to the show, it would
also seem that human death's scary finality comes in the body of a woman.
[9] The group's adult female role models do not improve much once they
begin to interact with the "heady discourse" of academia ("The Freshman,"
B4001). Three female
representatives of the university intellectual community each are treated as
monstrous mothers. First is
Willow Rosenberg's mother, Sheila, who is presented as the ultimate neglectful
mother in "Gingerbread" (B3011): she is completely uninvolved in and clueless
about Willow's life, everything from her haircut, to her best friend's name,
to her musician boyfriend, to her experiences with witchcraft, not to mention Sheila's obliviousness to all the times the gang
made "round robin" phone calls in order to secure permission to stay out all
night researching and saving the world. At
the same time, Sheila Rosenberg maintains a consciously feminist position, one
that Willow finds alienating, saying, "The last time we had a conversation
over three minutes, it was about the patriarchal bias of The Mister Rogers
Show" ("Gingerbread," B3011). While Sheila's response, "Well, with King Friday lording it
over the lesser puppets," is indeed a possible feminist critique of that
television show, her unwillingness to focus on Willow's actual complaint—that
her mother doesn't take the time to talk to her—makes Sheila Rosenberg seem
to be simultaneously an ineffectual mother and a nitpicking academic. In the
next season, Buffy accuses Willow of "channeling [her] mother" during a
blistering attack on the real meaning of Thanksgiving as "one culture wiping
out another" ("Pangs," B4008). This
conversation takes place as Professor Gerhardt of the UC Sunnydale
Anthropology department breaks the ground for a new cultural center on campus,
saying, "When I first realized we were outgrowing our current cultural center,
I was concerned. Then I
realized it was like seeing one's child grow up and move on to better things."
Although they fall on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, with Sheila
Rosenberg boycotting Columbus Day and Thanksgiving and Professor Gerhardt
celebrating the idea of the melting pot of U.S. American culture, the fact
that they are linked in the opening scene of this episode points to their
similar positioning within the academy, women more in touch with their work
than with actual, biological children. Furthermore,
Professor Gerhardt's "child," the cultural center, ultimately causes her own
death: the Native American spirit Hus is released as the ground is broken and
he later kills her and cuts off her ear with a Chumash knife on exhibit in the
cultural center, Xander gets syphilis, and a raiding party nearly ruins the
gang's Thanksgiving. The "child" has arguably gone on to bigger things, but not
necessarily better things. And
this is not even the most destructive child wrought by a female academic on
the show. Professor Walsh's
creation Adam—born from her brain and scientific work, not from her womb—deserves
this title, as he kills his "mommy," dissects a child and several demons,
leads the Sunnydale demons and vampires to infiltrate the Initiative and
attempts to "start a war that would kill us all," as Giles says at the end of "Primeval"
(B4021). But even before Adam develops into Season Four's "big bad," Professor
Walsh has become a problematic character.
Her intelligence and influence over Buffy threaten Giles, especially
when Buffy calls her "absolutely the smartest person I've ever met" ("A New
Man," B4012, see also J.P. Williams 69).
In the same episode, an important exchange between Giles and Professor
Walsh takes place in her office, in which Giles calls Buffy a "girl," and
Professor Walsh pointedly responds "I have found her to be a unique woman."
Giles snaps back: "Woman, of course, how wrong of me to choose my own
words." Even though Giles
attempts to use his interaction with Professor Walsh to instruct her on how to
deal with Buffy, he resents it when he himself is instructed.
Her feminist critique of his infantilizing rhetoric turns immediately
into a critique of her own character; the central character Giles operates as
a locus of both authority and sympathy, effectively reducing Walsh's
legitimate critique to a censorious nitpick.
He later calls her a "harridan," a "fishwife," and says "I'm twice the
man she is"—she has emasculated him and effectively (but only temporarily)
replaced him as Buffy's authority figure, even father figure ("A New Man,"
B4012). Given that the episode concerns Giles's generational and
informational isolation from the group, the audience is encouraged to identify
and feel sympathy for Giles, the feminized man, rather than Professor Walsh,
the masculinized woman (Jowett, 175-176).
All of these female academics can be seen in counterpoint to the male
academics: the professor of popular culture from "The Freshman" (B4001) who
throws Buffy out of his class for "sucking" the energy of the class, and the
history professor from "Checkpoint" (B5012) who derides Buffy's theories on
Rasputin as "Flights of Fancy 101." Neither
of the male professors's reproductive capacities is called into question or
even alluded to.
[10] However, adult female characters are not necessarily always
defined by their profession on the show.
For instance, Joyce's Book Club friend, Pat, from Season Three's "Dead
Man's Party" is defined by the plethora of activities with which she seems to
fill her "single lady" life. She
has attached herself to Joyce in Buffy's absence, making her an intrusive
presence once Buffy returns, even as she suggests that Buffy and Joyce need to
"rebond" ("Dead Man's Party," B3002). Throughout
the course of the episode, she makes reference to the other activities in her
life, like the book club (reading Oprah's Book Club pick The Deep End of
the Ocean), like making empanadas in her Spanish class, or in accepting
the invitation to Buffy's welcome home party saying, "[F]orget facial night
and let's party!" The episode
implies that she fills her life with a variety of activities because she lacks
a family of her own, and when Buffy kills her at the end of the episode
(because she puts on a mask and becomes a demon), it seems like poetic justice
that Buffy is getting her family back from her mother's usurping adult friend.
[11] Giles's adult friend Olivia represents a single life of a very
different sort. Olivia's
appearances on the show focus on sex, helplessness, silence, and childbearing,
aligning her with a very different (though similarly Victorian-inspired)
character type than that of the merry spinster represented by Pat.
Olivia appears in Season Four as an occasional sexual partner for
Giles, most notably in the episode "Hush" (B4010). She comes to town for the explicit purpose of having sex with
him, as she indicates by cutting their conversation short a minute after she
arrives: "That's enough small talk, don't you think?"
As they kiss, the camera pans down to Giles setting his glasses down on
the work he was doing figuring out who and what the Gentlemen are from Buffy's
dream ("Hush," 4010). Olivia is a
distraction to him, one incapable of actually helping to defend the town from
the monsters. Whedon's commentary
for "Hush" demonstrates that her helplessness was purposefully constructed: "I
needed people who would beÉnot as savvy and canny about everything that is
going on as our people" (DVD commentary, "Hush," B4010). She, as so many of the other adult women, serves to express
what an outsider might feel, what an ordinary person not endowed with
exceptional strength or knowledge might think in counterpoint to the
supernatural reality the show explores. But
as outsiders, the adult women are more often impediments to fighting evil or
saving the day than they are meaningful participants.
Her final appearance on the show, in "Restless" (B4022) reduces her
role further to that of a chastising reminder to Giles of the biological
family he cannot pursue having because of his relationship to the Slayer.
Her last moment as a character on the show comes when she appears
crying next to an empty, overturned stroller, an image which seemingly links
her unhappiness to a failure to produce Giles's offspring.
The normality she represents would seem to be limit her roles and
functions to those related directly to her sexuality and reproductive
potential. (For a reading of
Olivia that examines the character solely as a reflection of Giles's
sexuality and "adult" private life, see Jowett, 182, 184).
[12] This outsider status crescendos in the show's treatment of elderly
women. In "Teacher's Pet," when
Willow and Buffy try to locate the She-Mantis to stop her from having sex with
and then killing Xander, they arrive on the doorstep of the "real" Miss French
who taught biology at Sunnydale High for thirty years before retiring.
When Buffy exclaims in frustration that the She-Mantis "could be
anywhere," Miss French says, "No, dear, I'm right here" ("Teacher's Pet,"
B1004). The joke is that the
elderly woman mistakenly thinks that someone might actually be looking for
her, not a She-Mantis who stole her identity.
Another elderly woman with a thirty-year history of service to children
is Genevieve Holt, presented in Season Four as the children's aid from the
Lowell Home for Children. Under
her "reign of repression," as Anya calls it, she forcibly baptized children by
holding them underwater, shaved the heads of girls who "preen[ed] like
Jezebel," and generally punished the "dirty" children in her care, thus
causing the spirits of those children to haunt the fraternity house where
Buffy's boyfriend Riley lives ("Where the Wild Things Are," B4018).
Her calm demeanor and slight and feeble physical presence sharply
contrast with her rigid religious cruelty, thus exposing her as a monster of
sorts. The show presents another
twist on the invisibility and irrelevance of elderly women in Season Six's "Double
Meat Palace" (B6012), when it is revealed that the "wig lady" who comes in
everyday is actually a monster with a snake-like creature growing out of her
head. She eats Double Meat Palace
employees for their high fat content as well as because no one will miss them
given the high turnover of employees at fast food restaurants in general—as
someone else who is socially invisible, she recognizes those who share her
status to some degree. The show
acknowledges the limited social world of elderly people, but does very little
to overturn that notion. They are
treated as irrelevant to the show's central focus or as actively working
against it—either way there is no constructive role for them to play. All of this is dramatically confirmed in the final narrative
arc that brings the female Guardians into the Slayer mythology in Season
Seven. These "women who want to
help and protect [the Slayer]" illogically hid from the Shadow Men, silently
watched the Watcher's Council, and have done nothing actually helpful or
protective since they forged the scythe that killed the last pure demon who
walked the earth. The last
Guardian, who thinks Buffy's name is a joke and who also drolly remarks "I
look good for my age," dies right after giving this bit of exposition, her
neck snapped easily by Caleb ("End of Days," B7021).
Furthermore, the help from these ancient mystical women is reascribed
when Buffy tells Spike that the reason she even has this new, most powerful of
weapons is because of him—because
of the speech he gave her the night before, telling her that she is "a hell of
a woman" and encouraging her to continue fighting despite being dismissed from
the group ("End of Days," B7021).
[13] So far, we have only acknowledged the portrayal of individual
female characters on Buffy. The
show's presentation of female groups is similarly problematic, seeming to
question the entire idea of coalition-building, demonstrating again the narrow
focus of its definition of feminism. Groups
of women on the show are treated as well-intentioned but not necessarily
effective in achieving their goals. For
example, Joyce Summers's Mothers Opposed to the Occult, or MOO, is created
with the noble goal of "tak[ing] Sunnydale back" from the evil that surrounds
it. Joyce tells Buffy that her
work as the Slayer is "fruitless," but that MOO—mobilizing "grown-ups" and
using the bureaucratic machinery of the school and the state—will protect
the innocent ("Gingerbread," B3011). The organization's name itself suggests
that the (largely middle-aged) women who belong to it are docile, unthinking,
cow-like individuals, suggesting that mediocrity coming together, even if for
a well-meaning goal, is a particular kind of horror now being unleashed on
Sunnydale. The "wanna-blessed-bes"
of Willow's college Wicca group fare no better. In the commentary for "Hush" (B4010), Joss Whedon describes
the mentality of these "girls" as, "We are earthy and crunchy and useless."
The scene is designed to fit in with the general theme of the episode,
that language impedes actual communication, but it does manage to get a few
digs in against a particular kind of "woman power" group—one, as Willow
says, organized around "All talk. Blah,
blah, Gaia. Blah, blah, moon.
Menstrual lifeforce power thingy" ("Hush," B4010).
And they reject Willow's attempt to broaden the group's focus into the "wacky
notion of spells." The young
women in the group do not even get to benefit from the customary clever
language of the show. To Willow's
suggestion, one redundantly replies, "Oh yeah.
Then we could all get on our broomsticks and fly around on our
broomsticks" ("Hush," B4010). They
also manage to silence Tara, first interrupting her to say to Willow, "One
person's energy can suck the power from an entire circle" and then quieting
the group just so Tara can speak, which causes the painfully shy young woman
(who is also prone to stuttering) to refuse the chance.
The group receives a partial redemption in Season Seven, when Willow
seeks their help to reverse the spell that has turned her into Warren ("The
Killer in Me," B7013). However,
Amy does most of the speaking and action for the group, and they all leave
quickly after Amy's feigned attempts to help do nothing.
The group's initial ignorance of the Hellmouth and the supernatural
forces at work in Sunnydale and their later inability to perceive Amy as an
enemy in their midst or to help Willow in her hour of need make them seem
insignificant, and irrelevant to any of the potential feminist action to be
performed on the show.
[14] The perfect group of women on the show is actually never seen—the
disembodied coven from Devon that sends Giles to Sunnydale at the end of
Season Six to defeat the "dark magical force" they perceived to be rising in
Sunnydale ("Grave," B6022). They
imbue Giles with their power and send him to fight her—a strange choice
when, as Dark Willow points out, his "borrowed power" is a lesser one than
that of either Willow, or of the coven itself when united and embodied. Once Dark Willow has been stopped, she spends the first two
episodes of Season Seven under their tutelage. But this is really Giles's tutelage, as Willow, again,
points out. He is the one who has
gone "all Dumbledore" on her, teaching her to live with and control her power,
like the father figure character and most powerful wizard from the Harry
Potter series. They may be, as
Willow declares "the most amazing women [she's] ever met," but they are afraid
of her in a way Giles doesn't seem to be ("Lessons," B7001). By the third episode of the final season, Willow's mantra "everything's
connected" has gone from being something she learned from Miss Hartness in the
coven ("Lessons," B7001) to something that Giles has taught her ("Same Time,
Same Place," B7003). The coven
and its seers are mentioned periodically throughout Season Seven, finding
potential slayers and sending them to Sunnydale and consulting with Willow on
the final spell that will turn all potential slayers into actual ones ("Showtime,"
B7011; "Potential," B7012; "Chosen," B7022).
Taken together, the show has created a "powerful coven" to be Giles's
new instrument—they are a source of information that he wields just as he
did information from the Council or from his own extensive studies.
[15] It is important to treat Buffy's mother, Joyce Summers, as
emblematic of the process by which adult women's contributions are minimized
or overlooked as well as emblematic of how this process is linked to the idea
of age and an aging body. In the first two seasons, while Joyce has no
knowledge of her daughter's role as the Slayer, she seems an ineffectual
parent, and the dramatic irony in which she says things like "I know. If you
don't go out it'll be the end of the world.
Everything is life or death when you're a sixteen year-old girl!" ("The
Harvest," B1002) and Buffy and the audience know that it could be the end of
the world, makes her seem ridiculously out of touch with her daughter, and
with the reality of life as a resident and citizen of Sunnydale (Jowett,
178-179). For the show's "secret
identity" premise to work, Buffy has to keep her status as the Slayer hidden
from everyone. But as the show
goes on and various people are included into the group, one wonders why her
mother is not extended the same courtesy.
This is especially significant in the scene in "Passion" (B2017) when
Buffy knows that Angelus can enter the Summers home uninvited and may be
targeting Joyce. Buffy wants to
tell Joyce, but both Xander and Giles try to talk her out of it.
Xander, in what seems to be a stand-in voice for the show's writers and
insider audience, says "The more people who know the secret, the more it
cheapens it for the rest of us" ("Passion," 2017).
And Giles attributes the cause of the problem to Buffy acting as a "slave
to [her] passions" in wanting to protect her mother from Angelus's potential
assault. Either way, the group
drops the question without developing a satisfactory reason why Joyce cannot
know this crucial piece of information—the show nods in the direction that
it's silly and even dangerous for her not to know, but not enough to change
things. Joyce is, after all, an
ordinary woman who wouldn't know what to do with such information.
[16] Joyce herself acts as the symbol of all of the unpleasant aspects
of adulthood—failed relationships (with Buffy's dad and with the homicidal
robot Ted), family disappointments, chores and paperwork—she is nearly
always seen doing something related to home care, cooking, cleaning, or "wrestling
with the IRS" as she tells Darla in the episode "Angel" (B1007). As Lorna
Jowett has made clear, "Joyce's female strength is represented through
suffering" (183). Joyce's passive acceptance of pain and the banal
difficulties of adult life directly contrast with Buffy's active fight against
evil. But to move beyond her adult and motherly responsibilities,
Joyce is also the symbol of the aging female body. Joss Whedon's commentary for Season Five's "The Body"
(B5016), in which Joyce is "the body," indicates that the theme of this
episode is "the extreme physicality" of death, which he aimed to represent in
the episode by delivering "almost obscene physicality.
A little more physicality than we necessarily want or are used to."
This includes the sounds of Joyce's ribs breaking as Buffy gives her CPR, the "gross
and upsetting" (DVD commentary) thought that the paramedics or the audience
might see Joyce's underwear (really just her upper thighs) as they move the
body around, and the fact that each act opens with some view of Joyce as her
body is processed: she is zipped into a body bag, her clothes are cut off as
she is prepared for an autopsy, her head is bandaged after the doctor checks
where the tumor was ("The Body," B5016).
All of this stark confrontation with natural death, with "the body,"
which is expressly female here (even in the statue that Dawn is supposed to be
sketching in art class), demonstrates the connection established between
adult, mature women and death. When
Anya expresses her frustration with death in the episode, this becomes quite
clear. She says "There's just a
body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead
anymore. It's stupid.
It's mortal and it's stupid" ("The Body," B5016).
The "it" to which she refers does not necessarily just mean death; she
could also be referring to the female body in general, especially given Anya's
continuing focus on her own aging, mortal body (See for example "The
Replacement," B5003 and "Once More With Feeling," B6007).
Social irrelevance, aging, frailty—all of the negative aspects of
adulthood are embodied in the mature woman.
As much as Joyce was a constant, motherly presence in the lives of the
Scooby gang unnoticed until her death, she becomes also a constant reminder of
mortality as well, as her body finally fails.
[17] Given the show's engagement with discourses of feminism, and the
centrality of Buffy's status as initially a girl and then a young woman to the
show's premise and figuration of feminism, it seems certain that the show
constructs her as undeniably female—a subject as well as a material, sexed
body. While the show, arguably,
exists purely in the realm of discourse, Buffy's bodies—whether literally
those of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar and her body-doubles, those of the
secondary cast and stunt players, or even metaphorically that of the
always-already sexed character Buffy Summers who acts as the "hand" of
demon-slaying—circulate in the realm of the material. While in agreement
with Judith Butler that attempts to ground sex in materiality tend to
presuppose the constructed subject more than examine the means of its
construction, we here further concur that the category of materiality provides
not only a place to examine the ways in which femininity, women's bodies, and
the notion of the material are mobilized to articulate and contain subjects (Bodies, 28-31), but also that the material body represents a
category "without which we cannot do anything" (29). Here, the treatment of bodies affords an opportunity to
interrogate the show's engagement with feminism, as well as to expose some
troubling undercurrents which merit further examination.
So, then, how does the show treat bodies, especially female bodies?
[18] Perhaps ironically, one of the primary ways in which the show
deals with female bodies is by refusing to deal with them at all, or by
engaging with them only for the sake of a joke.
In a show that purports to deal with the real demons of adolescent
life, and featuring a female lead, it manages never to deal with problematic
menstruation; on the rare occasion when menstrual periods make an appearance,
at the margin of the show, it is for the purposes of a joke, as in B2003 "School
Hard," when Buffy sends Xander to her purse for a stake and he finds instead a
tampon, causing him to flinch and drop it, or in B2016 "Bewitched, Bothered
and Bewildered" when Cordelia faces irate critique from the bespelled Harmony
and remarks "Ok, Harmony, if you need to borrow my Midol, just ask." While some critics seem inclined to excuse the show's refusal
to address adolescent female bodies seriously, it is not enough to say that it's
a television show and therefore it could not do so.
In fact, given that the show—like all television—uses its platform
to sell products, it seems strange that the show wouldn't use its opportunity
to sell precisely such products as Midol or tampons.
By treating the bodies of the young women on the show as important and
the characters as role models, the frame could expand and menstruation could
be treated as common ground, much as the show did when allowing Sarah Michelle
Gellar to license her Buffy face to Maybelline. However, unlike makeup, in the
first case menstruation exists purely as the set-up for a joke predicated upon
masculine panic when faced with the reality of menstruation and in the second
case, menstruation exists as peripheral to a common-sense logic of the
hormonally irrational woman, the PMS sufferer in need of an over-the-counter
remedy for her temporary insanity. Similarly, in "Phases" (B2015), when Willow
finds out that Oz is a werewolf, she compares his monthly three-day
transformation into a beast to her own implied PMS when she says, "Three days
out of the month, I'm not much fun to be around either."
Here, not only does menstruation exist purely to set up a joke about
the insanity of women with PMS, but the joke does not even consider the girl's
experience of her own body and hormonal fluctuations, merely expresses
sympathy for the inconvenience it poses to others by making her "not much fun
to be around."
[19] In fact, while the show studiously avoids dealing directly with
the realities of a maturing adolescent female's body, it frequently addresses
the male body, also as a source of humor, but differently. Consistently, jokes about the male body rely upon similarly
common-sense logics of adolescent male sexual fantasy, objectification of
women, and masturbation, yet without offering significant critique.
However, while the jokes aimed at female bodies mobilize a verbal
castigation and containment of those same bodies by yoking them to Victorian
notions of insanity and even degeneracy associated with the biological
necessity of menstruation, jokes directed at male bodies and bodily habits do not target the
males for judgment and containment so much as make merry sport of the
uncontainable nature of male desire. For
instance, in "Harsh Light of Day" (B4003), Anya enters Xander's basement and
removes her clothing while he reaches for a juice box; when his gaze returns
to her body, he squeezes the juice container and it erupts in an arc, an
implicit reference to and joke about adolescent male sexual excitability and
tendency to early climax. Only
two episodes later, as Buffy and Willow discuss the desire to find a male
companion in whom the mind is mightier than the penis, Xander exclaims "Nothing
can defeat the penis!"–a joke which earns him the derisive stares of the
young women, but upon which he comments only "Too loud. Very unseemly," as though volume were the problem with the
intrusive assertion ("Beer Bad," B4005).
Similarly, while many have noted the show's fetishization of male and
female bodies alike and some see in this an egalitarian impulse, few note the
ways in which male gazes work to objectify female characters unproblematically,
such as in "Restless" (B4022) when Willow's dream is disrupted and Xander
allowed to comment about his masturbation while fantasizing about the lesbian
sex life of his best friend Willow and her love interest Tara.
In the commentary over this episode, writer/director Whedon allows that
the moment does not work diegetically, as it places Willow's own dream in the
point-of-view of another, Xander, and that doing so violates the internal
logic of the dream structure by marginalizing the central character's own
consciousness, but that he kept it because he found it funny (DVD commentary).
Even bonding with each other,
women do so, within the show, through phallic jokes rather than shared
experience of their own bodies, as when potential slayer Rona remarks that she
just likes "the feel of wood in [her] hand," and lesbian fellow-potential
Kennedy replies that Rona "lost [her] there" ("Potential," B7012).
[20] So what happens, then, when the show does address female
bodies? Some of the treatment is
business as usual: containment of
female desire through attachment to a love object; projection of socially
marginal, anarchic violent, sexual and other embodied impulses onto males
and/or females depicted as explicitly monstrous; and explicit fear of aging—as
in Buffy's concern about having "Mom hair" ("Lessons," B7001). However, on rare occasions, the show deviates from its
typically superficial and elided treatment of female bodies; when it does, the
results suggest a limited effort at complex depiction, the mixed results of
which open a host of difficulties. To
exemplify this, the much-bemoaned death of Tara bears further scrutiny.
While Kaveney offers a reading of this and subsequent scenes intended
to dispense with all critiques of Tara's death as recapitulating the
all-too-familiar death or insanity options presented most often to lesbian
characters (35), it does not go far enough to say that because Warren did not
aim for Tara, her death and Willow's resultant vengeance spree do not
contribute to a "punish lesbianism" reading, because doing so simply sidesteps
examining several key points of the portrayal.
While Tara does not die due to the misogynist Warren's wrath against
her in particular or lesbians in general, her death comes as a direct result
of her reconciliation with Willow and the physical expression of it through
sex. Throughout the episode ("Seeing Red," B6019), the lesbian
lovers are depicted in bed, in afterglow, or engaged in the continual
foreplay, both public and private, common to newlyweds. In fact, only because of their post-coital malingering and
playful sexual banter are she and Willow still in the room when Warren's stray
bullet strikes. While one might
overlook this choice as coincidental, this moment acquires additional
significance when one considers that in all previous episodes of their
multiple season relationship, the lovers' sexual union has played on the level
of metaphor—plenty of hand holding, glances, and floating roses, but no sex.
In fact, show creators comment on more than one occasion that magical
practice plays as metaphor for sex between the two witches (see for instance
Whedon's commentary on "Hush," B4010), an assertion already complicated by
season six's alignment of magical practice with addiction.
Lesbian sex, then, begins as magic—which evolves into an addiction,
one which drives Tara & Willow apart—but becomes physical, only to be
followed immediately by death for one and insanity (in the form of an
addictive spiral of self-and other-destruction) for the other.
As soon as their sexuality and its expression grow overtly material and
embodied, Tara dies by penetrating wound, allowed to comment upon her
splattered blood only in the context of her lover's stained clothing:
"your shirt" ("Seeing Red," B4019).
[21] The bloody death of Tara raises questions beyond that of the
portrayal and textual containment of lesbianism, when taken in context with
Whedon's commentary on the
actress Amber Benson, who played Tara. In
the commentary for "Hush" (B4010), Whedon notes that he "wanted someone
smaller" and less "womanly" than Benson for Tara, as her adult body did not,
to him, convey the supposed emotional vulnerability he was looking for in the
character (DVD commentary). While he ultimately came around to admiration for
the actress's abilities at playing the character, his comment on her body—a
healthy body, and still well below average size, but larger than the other
actresses on the show—also raises questions about the producers' reasons for
killing the character. If Benson
had been a size two, would it have been another chosen to die? Additionally,
the "splatter death," one of the few on the show, and certainly one of very
few concerning major characters, brings the textual moment back to its roots
in horror cinema, by linking her death to the signs of abjection common to
horror. Matt Hills and Rebecca Williams cite Barbara Creed in
discussing the use of abjection as "any ritual or process that is concerned
with protecting the self's Ôclean and proper body'" (204, Creed 9-11).
In this sense, then, any moment on screen in which blood, mucous or
other bodily fluids pass the barrier of the body is a scene of abjection, a
moment at which the body's borders become permeable and the subject loses
coherence. In Creed's work, she explains that the mobilization of abjection
appears to contain "monstrous femininity" (12) by relegating all bodily
processes to a position of lack and inflicting torture on that objectified
body as a kind of psychic punishment for violating cultural body taboos.
In Judith Butler's work, abjection figures as a part of subject
construction, a way in which the body and its natural processes become first
internalized as negative in meaning, then productive of self-loathing, and
finally generate a set of rituals to contain the threat to the subject-self
posed by recognition of the body as animal (Power
50-51). In this sense, then, the showing of Tara's blood, especially given
that the usual figures of abjection in horror—here, the vampires—turn to
dust rather than bleeding, relegates her to the position of abject. That the
character has so recently been portrayed as engaged in sexual union adds to
the abjection, amplifying the threat posed by her body by asserting, for the
first and only time, its animal drives and needs. Her body is violated and its
disruptive potential contained in the same gesture. The doubled body, both of
character and actress, is made the locus of a nexus of meanings which punish
the body in its excesses of materiality.
[22] The notion of abjection also offers an interesting turn to reading
the show's final episode. To open the Hellmouth and enable their assault on
the minions of the First, the Slayers and Potentials use their own blood,
slashing their hands to open the seal, passing the knife between them,
beginning with Buffy and ending with the unnamed minor Potentials. In his
commentary on "Chosen" (B7022), Whedon
calls this a "good, earthy, almost-menstrual metaphor" which he labels "important
because they're all becoming empowered together" (DVD commentary). What he
never explains is what this metaphorically represents. If the young women
share a "red tent" experience, bonding emotionally by bleeding together, what
binds them is ultimately their self-mortification, a far cry from the natural
processes of menstruation. More importantly, if Whedon means the audience to
read this moment of bleeding as the shared experience of menstruation, what
might it mean that this moment also opens a door to hell by the passage of
blood through a permeable, round portal? If those moments represent a vaginal
metaphor, as in Whedon's account, then the shared vagina also represents the
ultimate site of abjection—the final taboo. Crossing this threshold is
literally a passage to hell; that the young women receive their slayer powers
only moments later actually underscores the abjection more than redeems it as
abjection operates as an "unmaking" of self to allow a refashioning to suit
the desires of another (Butler, Power
52). Here, the young women lose who they each were through a ritual
self-mortification in order to meet the desires of, narratively, Buffy and,
metanarratively, Joss Whedon and the show's other producers. This moment's "empowerment"
metaphor seems to undermine its own liberatory message at the same moment that
it articulates it, much in the way that the "shared power" metanarrative of
the season undermines its own message by silencing all voices but Buffy's as a
means to articulate a cooperative empowerment message (on this point, see
Spicer par. 28). Beyond the problems at the level of symbolic meaning, the
moment resists reading in any real-world context; there is no single act that
all women can realistically choose to participate in and share—even
menstruation represents a shared circumstance, but not a choice.
How, then, are real females empowered by this moment?
The most this moment offers its audience is a vague hope of a
P/potential future empowerment, based upon a problematic metaphorical choice
and as-yet-unnamed symbolic act of self-mortification.
[23] If menstruation figures rarely and problematically in the
narrative of Buffy, the show's treatment of maternity serves to refine
the message of bodily mortification, amplifying it in several ways for
projection onto the mature females of the Buffyverse. Character reduction to
container for offspring underscores a tendency to position maternity as
self-sacrificing and erasing of identity and external referential purpose for
women, a tendency both shows share with generations of writers, particularly
because, as Barbara Creed puts it, functions such as "menstruation and
childbirth are seen as [É] two events in a woman's life which [É] place [É]
her on the side of the abject" (Creed 50, cited in Hills & Williams 205).
This tendency toward reduction through maternity tendency appears, as noted
above, in the treatment of mothers whose children already exist, in that their
lives revolve around sacrifice and suffering, or they appear as monstrous for
failing to do so. In the portrayal of pregnancy and birth, however, the
erasure of women as agents and reconstruction as sacrificial objects becomes
more apparent yet. While no major character bears a child during the run of
the show, Darla and Cordelia, two characters originally created on Buffy,
go on to give birth during their tenure on Angel. The first character
with a narrative arc involving pregnancy is Darla, whose return to life as a
human woman marked the end of the spin-off's first season.
Acting as a narrative center of the second year, Darla's relationship
with Angel is revealed as a complex one somewhere between mother and lover.
Strangely, after becoming a vampire again when Drusilla sires her dying,
syphilitic body, Darla becomes pregnant with Angel's child during a night of
sex after which he rejects her brutally and with finality. Interestingly,
shortly before becoming a vampire again, the dying human Darla tells Wolfram
& Hart attorney Lindsay "I can feel this body dying, Lindsey. It's being
eaten away by this thing inside of it" ("Darla," A2007). The ambiguity of this
moment allows for a reading in which she refers not to the syphilis killing
her, nor to the soul she only recently reacquired, but to life itself. Read
this way, given the events of the next season, the scene acts as foreshadowing
of the "thing inside" which does kill her, the infant Connor. When Darla
returns at the beginning of Angel's third season, she is hugely
pregnant, an obscene possibility what came about at least partially as the
result of a crass joke by writer and producer Tim Minear who, when asked what
the writers should do to open the third year, asked Joss Whedon if they could
bring back "something in Darla's box" (DVD commentary, "Lullaby," A3009). The
rather vulgar objectification aside, the idea that her body acts as a conduit
for story purposes posits her body as vessel, and the narrative arc creates
her as a polluted vessel, one who must die to give birth to innocence because,
as the character Wesley puts it, she is not "a life-giving vessel. She cannot
do what must be done in order to bring a baby to term" ("Lullaby," A3009).
While pregnant, Darla shares the soul of the fetus, a figuration which both
supports an anti-abortionist reading of life beginning at conception and which
figures her as incomplete, as her moral accountability must be acquired from a
fetus, whose self is more complete in utero than is hers after more than four
centuries. Her undead body cannot give birth, however, and so in order to save
the infant she stakes herself, an act of self-sacrifice so complete it
literally destroys her and, unlike her previous deaths, from this one she does
not return to life. Calling
Connor "the one good thing, the only good thing" she and Angel did together,
she stakes herself because when she ceases to share a soul with Connor, she
will no longer be able to "love" him ("Lullaby," A3009). Here, maternal love
figures as self-sacrifice to an impressively literal extent.
[24] It seems to some extent that sacrifice of self and one's ambitions
read as moral maturity in the Buffyverse—but is that only true for women in
the Buffyverse, or for all of us? Cordelia, as Hills & Williams note,
faces peril constantly, especially subject to abjection via rape and demonic
spawn (206). It is interesting, too, that Darla's sacrifice quite literally
sires Cordelia's though the vector of Connor, Darla's son and father of
Cordelia's offspring. While some might claim that because neither birth shows
the bloodiness, there's not a clear link to the typical horror use of
abjection, but Darla's ashy death by suicidal penetrating wound and Cordelia's
belly absorbing the blood of an innocent murder victim bring the literal body
abjection back into frame. Further, while television rules and producer choice
shift the imagery, death is the culmination and ultimate expression of the
sacrificial maternal abjection, as the inside/outside binary of the body
compromised by birth lends itself to the episode title "Inside Out" (A4017),
highlighting the liminality and disruption of this moment (Hills &
Williams 206). That the character enters a coma and then ultimately dies as a
result of the birth only underscores the ways in which the show posits
maternity as an erasure and self-sacrifice. Additionally, the show's
projection of this sacrificial maternal body onto the body of Charisma
Carpenter, using her real-life pregnancy, extends the abjection beyond the
frame onto the body of the actress. As the actor's body changes, the character
audience know and expect erodes, leaving an increasingly "crazy pregnant lady"
("Orpheus," A4015).
Interestingly, this escaping of the frame seems to extend even to writers'
readings of the show, as when critic Ian Shuttleworth cites Carpenter's
pregnancy as the cause for the show's weaknesses in its fourth season, blaming
the "(literally) growing biological demands made on the actress" (251) for the
show's failure to present a coherent and compelling story. This aligning of
maternity and female biology with failure and lack furthers the abjection, and
mimics the logic of the glass ceiling, which denies women access to corporate
and other structural power by treating the potential for maternity as a sure
sign of female weakness and inability to sustain career focus. The culmination
of Cordelia's pregnancy leaves her in a coma, while the culmination of
Carpenter's leaves her unemployed, written out of a series after four years
and out of a character after seven, seemingly purely due to becoming pregnant
without producer permission.
[25] At the moment of empowerment in the series finale, the only
people the audience sees receiving the slayer power are girls ("Chosen,"
B7022), and twenty-year-old Kennedy has voiced concerns that she may be too
old to be a slayer. What about all the potential slayers Buffy's age and
older?
One of the consequences of the show's narrative structure and writers'
choices during its run is that there's no room left to imagine adult women
being similarly empowered by this moment. The disidentifications with
and erasures of adult women, failure of female communities, and refusal to
address women's bodies other than as abjected does not necessarily undermine
the show's, producers', or audience members' feminism. This essay's title,
drawn from the episode "Band Candy" (B3006), provide a frame in which to
understand our point: in dialogue between Joyce and Buffy, each uses the
phrase "and yet" to acknowledge the limitations Buffy faces—limitations
imposed by the authority of first Principal Snyder (who orders her to sell
candy for the band despite not being in
the band) and then Joyce (who calls herself the "best" mom, but refuses to let
Buffy drive). The phrase "and yet"
cuts both ways—it signals a recognition of these limits, but it also
ironically concedes that these limits remain unchallenged on any level but the
rhetorical. We contend that the
show similarly addresses some of the problems of feminism and female
empowerment—by acknowledging at least some of the challenges, tipping a wink
to the show's own limitations, and ultimately letting them stand. These
problems are not limited to mass culture, commodity culture, or any other
facet of contemporary life. While
this show does not represent a perfectly applicable message of real-world
empowerment, it does concern itself with the issues and attempt to engage with
those issues in productive ways. And
yet, its interventions leave much unaddressed while also creating all new
problems of representation and applicability, which critics have too often
overlooked in the effort to redeem a show they, understandably, laud for its
feminist intentions and witty writing. Perhaps,
then, the best message to take from this is that, like slaying the forces of
evil, feminism's work is never done.
Renee
St. Louis & Miriam Riggs